I remember seeing ‘Dead Poet’s Society,’ and it made it appealing in a way that I actually went to prep school.
You can’t read to yourself. It’s your inner ear that hears a poem. If you hear a poet read his own work, it becomes very exciting. The melody is a great part of it.
Sometimes I feel as if I am read before I write. When I write a poem about my mother, Palestinians think my mother is a symbol for Palestine. But I write as a poet, and my mother is my mother. She’s not a symbol.
The wonderful 17th Century poet, Robert Herrick, wrote a poem entitled, ‘To Live Merrily and to Trust to Good Verses.’ Easy to say, Robert Herrick; not always easy to do. But it’s a good slogan, I think.
I am not less poet; I am more conscious of all that I am, am not, and might become.
The poet doesn’t invent. He listens.
It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.
I’m a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.
June Jordan, who died of cancer in 2002, was a brilliant, fierce, radical, and frequently furious poet. We were friends for thirty years. Not once in that time did she step back from what was transpiring politically and morally in the world. She spoke up, and led her students, whom she adored, to do the same.
You don’t become a poet if you want to make any money.
The poet is primarily a spokesman, making statements or incantations on behalf of himself or others – usually for both, for it is difficult to speak for oneself without speaking for others or to speak for others without speaking for oneself.
Find a poet whose style you like, emulate that style, then deal with things that you know about – don’t waste your time looking for your own style.’ I wish I could remember who told me that, because I’d like to congraulate him. I’ve emulated all the old guys – Tennyson, Alexander Pope.
I love the 19th-century idea of the flaneur, the poet wandering through the streets.
The talent of a true writer and poet is in the ear.
I cannot write poetically, for I am no poet. I cannot make fine artistic phrases that cast light and shadow, for I am no painter. I can neither by signs nor by pantomime express my thoughts and feelings, for I am no dancer; but I can by tones, for I am a musician.
I cannot say I’m a poet. That’s for someone when they take in consideration where they can bestow ‘poet’ on. I can’t do it. But I would be disingenuous if I didn’t say that my intention is poetry.
I believe the poet shouldn’t be in the poem at all except as a lens or as ears.
I would say, from an all-around point of view, Bruce Springsteen is one of the two great poet lords of America, Bob Dylan, coming out of the music world, the two of them.
Lyrics became important for a while in the late Seventies. Patti Smith was a poet and a rock star, as much one as the other, the distinctions were a bit blurred and then you get swept up in it. Punk poet, it’s a good enough term.
A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.
Any poet, if he is to survive beyond his 25th year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to express.
At college, I wanted to be a poet. I liked the extremely concentrated language, the atmosphere of otherworldliness.
My mom is Irish. She is a poet and a humanitarian who believed in ensuring that people around her had a better life.
Any great warrior is also a scholar, and a poet, and an artist.
I wore a cloak for many years, I had long hair, I may have had a drop earring for a week and I fancied myself as a philosopher poet but was somewhere more in the gay female leisure pirate.
The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.
A starry sky is equally interesting to a scientist, a mystic, an ethics scholar, and a poet. Looking at the stars, each experiences something different, and each sees his own picture.
I think there’s a deep impulse in most humans to do creative stuff, whether that’s music or art, photography or writing. Most people at some point in their life say they want to do something creative – they want to be an actor, a director, a writer, a poet, a painter or whatever.
Why do people want to know exactly who I am? Am I a poet? Am I this or that? I’ve always made people wary. First they called me a rock poet. Then I was a poet that dabbled in rock. Then I was a rock person who dabbled in art.
Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher’s the poet’s equal there.
My mother was an actress and a director, as well. And my father was a playwright and poet.
I come from a short fiction background, and my mom is a poet, so I’ve always read poetry; I’ve always had a lot of different influences both linguistically and musically.
Sport in itself has this power. If you are a poet or a singer, people gravitate. I may not be in the same category, but I will make a comparison with Bob Marley. So it isn’t just cricket where social commentary plays a huge part.
There are distinct duties of a poet laureate. I plan a reading series at the Library of Congress and advise the librarian. The rest is how I want to promote poetry.
For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.
Love is poetry. To fall in love with a person is like understanding a deep, moving poem. Noticing every little detail. To see what the poet shows, to smell what he describes and the urge to taste the intangible.
He passes from lyric to epic poetry in order to speak about the world and the torment in the world through man, rationally and emotionally. The poet then becomes a danger.
Goethe died in 1832. As you know, Goethe was very active in science. In fact, he did some very good scientific work in plant morphology and mineralogy. But he was quite bitter at the way in which many scientists refused to grant him a hearing because he was a poet and therefore, they felt, he couldn’t be serious.
I think some period drama can be quite alienating, but ‘Downton’ isn’t. This is going to sound quite, um, pretentious, but someone said that it’s like a soap written by a poet.
I began to write in an enclosed, self-confident literary culture. The poet’s life stood in a burnished light in the Ireland of that time. Poets were still poor, had little sponsored work, and could not depend on a sympathetic reaction to their poetry. But the idea of the poet was honored.
I think the best American poetry is the poetry that utilizes the resources of poetry rather than exploits the defects or triumphs of the poet’s personality.
It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in soul.
A tramp, a gentleman, a poet, a dreamer, a lonely fellow, always hopeful of romance and adventure.
The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.
Pakistan is heir to an intellectual tradition of which the illustrious exponent was the poet and philosopher Mohammad Iqbal. He saw the future course for Islamic societies in a synthesis between adherence to the faith and adjustment to the modern age.
Only the most acute and active animals are capable of boredom. – A theme for a great poet would be God’s boredom on the seventh day of creation.
I’m really lucky in that I can do lots of different things. It must be really hard to just be a poet or just be a novelist – a constant cycle of effort and exhaustion and recuperation.
I want to be remembered as a poet, a peacemaker, and a philosopher who played.
Life as a poet and actor truly became full circle as I stood on stage as host of ‘Verses & Flow’ and lived in both of these outfits. It was one of the best experiences of my professional life.
Jim, as just a spoken poet, was not that good. He needed the music behind him. He felt a security and a sense of abandon when the music existed around him.
I fell in love with social work, and that was my undoing as a poet.
A poet who is a bad man is a degraded being, baser and more culpable than a bad man who is not a poet.
The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
I’ve never written poetry. I’m not a poet, but I think the nearest you get is either the short story or the novella, in that you can’t waste a word. There is no hiding place: everything’s got to be seen to relate, and the prose counts.
A poet or prose narrator usually looks back on what he has achieved against a backdrop of the years that have passed, generally finding that some of these achievements are acceptable, while others are less so.
I do not want to be bored listening to music that is muffled and known only to the poet himself.
Gregory Corso used to get really pissed when people called Bob Dylan a ‘poet.’ After writing poetry for a few years, I can understand that.
I’m a poet.
A great poet is the most precious jewel of a nation.
We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.
The poet has no greater number of muscles than the ordinary conversationalist; he merely has more highly developed muscles and better coordination. And he practises his activity according to a stricter set of rules.
